“It’s a good idea,” Sax said. “But I’m surprised you’re doing what Hiroko says.”
“Very funny,” Desmond said with a grimace. “Anyway, I think it’s a good idea too.”
“You do?”
“No. But she talked me into it. It may be for the best. Anyway there’s still a lot of materials to be obtained.”
“Won’t theft itself tip off the police that we’re still out there?”
“No way. It’s so widespread that what we do can’t be noticed against the background levels. There’s a whole lot of inside jobs.”
“Like me.”
“Yes, but you’re not doing it for money, are you.”
“I still don’t like it.”
Desmond laughed, revealing his stone eyetooth, and the odd asymmetricality of his jaw and his whole lower face. “It’s hostage syndrome. You work with them and you get to know them, and have a sympathy for them. You have to remember what they’re doing here. Come on, finish that cactus and I’ll show you some things you haven’t seen, right here in Burroughs.”
There was a commotion, as an ice shot had hit the other bank and rolled up the grass and bowled over an old man. People were cheering and lifting the woman who had made the throw onto their shoulders, but the group with the old man was charging down to the nearest bridge. “This place is getting too noisy,” Desmond said. “Come on, drink that and let’s go.”
Sax knocked back the liquor while Desmond popped the last of the inhaler. Then they left quickly to avoid the developing brouhaha, walking up the canalside path. A half hour’s walk took them past the rows of Bareiss columns and up into Princess Park, where they turned right and walked up the steep wide grassy incline of Thoth Boulevard. Beyond Table Mountain they turned left down a narrower swath of streetgrass, and came to the westernmost part of the tent wall, extending in a big arc around Black Syrtis Mesa. “Look, they’re getting back to the old coffin quarters for workers again,” Desmond pointed out. “That’s Subarashii’s standard housing now, but see how these units are set into the mesa. Black Syrtis contained a plutonium processing plant in the early days of Burroughs, when it was well out of town. But now Subarashii has built workers’ quarters right next to it, and their jobs are to oversee the processing and the removal of the waste, north to Nili Fossae, where some integral fast reactors will use it. The cleanup operation used to be almost completely robotic, but the robots are hard to keep on-line. They’ve found it’s cheaper to use people for a lot of the jobs.”
“But the radiation,” Sax said, blinking.
“Yes,” Desmond said with his savage grin. “They take on forty rem a year.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I am not kidding. They tell the workers this, and give them hardship pay, and after three years they get a bonus, which is the treatment.”
“Is it withheld from them otherwise?”
“It’s expensive, Sax. And there are waiting lists. This is a way to skip up the list, and cover the costs.”
“But forty rems! There’s no way to be sure the treatment will repair the damage that could do!”
“We know that,” Desmond said with a scowl. There was no need to refer to Simon. “But they don’t.”
“And Subarashii is doing this just to cut costs?”
“That’s important in such a large capital investment, Sax. All kinds of cost-cutting measures are showing up. The sewage systems in Black Syrtis are all the same system, for instance— the med clinic and the coffins and the plants in the mesa.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am not kidding. My jokes are funnier than that.”
Sax waved him off.
“Look,” Desmond said, “there are no regulatory agencies anymore. No building codes or whatever. That is what the transnational success in sixty-one really means— they make their own rules now. And you know what their one rule is.”
“But this is simply stupid.”
“Well, you know, this particular division of Subarashii is run by Georgians, and they’re in the grip of a big Stalin revival there. It’s a patriotic gesture to run their country as stupidly as possible. That means business too. And of course the top managers of Subarashii are still Japanese, and they believe Japan became great by being tough. They say they won in sixty-one what they lost in World War Two. They’re the most brutal transnat up here, but all the rest are imitating them to compete successfully. Praxis is an anomaly in that sense, you must remember that.”